Mobile Learning: Beyond Online
Tasked with mobilizing education technology for combat deployment, the U.S. Army has contracted Florida Community College to assist in adapting online college course material to a mobile learning format that can be used by soldiers in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. A key challenge will be overcoming intermittent Internet access in these often remote locations.
By Diana McGonigle
The U.S. Army, in coordination with Florida Community College, has undertaken an initiative to reconfigure college courses to a mobile learning format. The courses will be available to servicemembers in combat theater regardless of Internet access.
Q: What is the Mobile Learning Project?
Moorash: The Army was given a $1 million Congressional earmark back in 2006 to mobilize education technology for combat deployment. That particular earmark became available as a contract, so a solicitation process was undertaken, and Florida Community College of Jacksonville bid on that proposal at their rate. It was accepted by the Army and the contract was let to support this initiative. Under that contract, Florida had some requirements to deliver six online courses and convert or adapt them to a mobile learning format that could be used by soldiers in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where they have little or intermittent Internet access, or perhaps no Internet access at all.
Those courses’ intent was that the modification of the classes, the adapting of them, would mean that the academic integrity wasn’t lost, that they maintained the same rigor, and that they allowed for flexible, learner-directed contact on untethered or handheld devices that did not require access to the Internet. That contract was for a year-long project for them to develop six of those courses under contract and deliver them to the Army on the selected devices of their choice, which were untethered.
The review of the course content is what the Army undertook as part of the contract. We ensured that quality assurance measures were in place, that best practices were adhered to, that the courses themselves didn’t lose any of their academic rigor in the process, and that it was preserved. So that really led us then to the development of these courses that [Jeff’s] team took on as a project and then worked to complete.
Kissinger: We worked on these six mobile courses that Amy mentioned. It was definitely a challenge because we had to do a heavy needs analysis on the front end of this population where little is really known of how learning takes place in a mobile learning environment for distributed and off-line populations. It really fits with a lot of our mission here on Open Campus with the courses we offer currently. We offer extensive distance learning online courses for our population which includes nontraditional learners and also a lot of military students. This is just a natural extension of increasing that flexibility and access to students who don’t always have the luxury to be online. It really was a challenge, we are satisfied with the work we did for the Army and the six courses we created, and we hope to deliver those in a pilot really, really soon, hopefully by this summer.
Moorash: I think that it’s worth mentioning that the Army felt that Florida did an incredible job of delivering in a unique environment, and preserving the academic integrity. We can get into how that was constructed by Florida and achieved through the contract. But the contract itself did not allow for or require the fielding of these classes. Florida’s contract is now over; it ended in September [2007] and Florida could field these courses as they saw fit in accordance with their accrediting agency.
Q: Did students supply their own PDAs or were mobile devices given to them?
Kissinger: We haven’t piloted them yet. We plan on doing that hopefully this summer. And for the pilot, we are going to supply the mobile computers. They’re not PDAs; they’re very small, portable, handheld, larger-screen mobile computers. Typically they go by UMPC—ultra mobile portable PC. There’s a whole host of companies that are making these. One of the most popular machines that sort of started a lot of this, I think, is the One Laptop per Child, [Nicholas] Negroponte’s project. And a few other companies, for-profit companies—actually, the one that Negroponte runs is a nonprofit organization—a few companies that created the EPCs, there’s also EverX’s Cloudbooks. They’re all about the same size and form factor as the OL PC.
We’re looking at a multitude of devices, and when we worked with Army this year, we used two different platforms just to be able to show the universal nature of the courseware.
One was a Linux-based ultra mobile portable PC called a Pepperpad and the other was a tablet kiosk XP-based machine. They both have 5-to-7 inch screens and they fit in the palm of your hand. The reason we decided to choose UMPC platform versus iPod and PDA is that the Army required us to have a self-contained learning solution where you could create papers, do activities, interact with media and a whole host of things including textbook materials and published materials on the device as well.
PDAs are not being made anymore; it’s kind of a dinosaur technology; it’s been sucked up into your iPhones and smart phones. You’re starting to see this mid-market emerge where basically it’s the UMPCs and things. That’s what we have our courses on and we try to offer them in such a way that they can be quickly ported to various platforms and operating systems.
Moorash: I think one of the big successes of the project is in terms of what Florida did with regard to trying to convert these. Think about course design in an online environment where you interact with the instructor and other classmates in the course, and there are threaded discussions on any learning platform where the class is hosted. This particular project requires that all of that be done in a self-contained environment where there wasn’t any necessity or capability to interact with the instructor. Florida was able to do that, and I think, as Jeff indicated, take the actual concept and make it portable enough so that independently of the actual technology a soldier or a student might use, these courses could be ported to these different environments. This is, I would say, one of the biggest successes with respect to the contract.
Q: There wasn’t any interaction with the instructor?
Kissinger: Two different things. I guess we can talk about the development process a little later. The faculty were active designers in the instructional design and development of the courses we offered. They were definitely active designers in the whole process. There’s an extensive training piece and certification piece of the project as well. Now in terms of the course going forward, their level of interactivity and feedback with the students is going to be greatly contingent upon the students’ schedule and if they’re deployed in their unique environments. The way we designed the courses—they would work with little or no Internet connectivity. But when you can get connectivity, the way the courses and modules were designed is that students are encouraged to get in touch with their instructors, send their assignments and get instructional feedback when they can. The whole premise of the instructional design in the project was to design a course that was more flexible than your standard stop-and-start courses delivered in the online environment with finite start-and-stop dates. These are more self-paced, with a more open entrance-open exit feel, designed for the lack of connectivity or erratic connectivity soldiers may have when serving and the unique nature of their schedules. They may be in a port for a few weeks; they may be on a ship for a while. This is really designed so they can keep their progress and learning going when they are experiencing these challenging variables in their learning environment.
Q: What courses did you develop?
Kissinger: We did English Composition I; we did a criminal justice introduction course; we did college algebra, Math 1105; Earth Science and Lab; and we did a microcomputer applications and an introduction to a Spanish course.
Q: How did you do earth sciences with a lab? How can you do a lab through distance learning?
Kissinger: We lave a lot of online courses with labs contained in them. What we did with the Earth science course was the instructor—let me go back a few steps here and talk about how the courses are organized and maybe that will help. The courses are organized into distinct modules with specific learning objectives in each module. Inside each of those modules is a linear scaffolded set of activities where the instructor is talking to the student—very learner-centered—guiding and scaffolding the student through each module and learning activity. So in the Earth science course, the instructor introduces the topic, talks about some key points, does a small learning piece—a mini-lecture if you will—on some of the things they’ll be covering, the concepts; and then the students go through and do various self-directed activities, all the way through completing assignments and doing labs. When they have connectivity, they are told to share their work with the instructor to get some feedback when they can. That’s how they proceed through each of the modules.
Moorash: I would like to add to what Jeff is saying. It helps to visualize it a little bit. You might have that video, a video clip of the instructor; you’ve got a sense of presence of somebody actually talking to you. And not just a talking head. In addition, this instructor can actually have clips where they’re doing activities related to the class and showing you about those, like in the Earth science class where they may be breaking up rocks and showing you what they look like. You yourself have a lab kit and you’re asked, “Now go and use your hammer and break up the rocks and report or do the next module and answer the questions related to that.” So there’s a sense of interaction with the content when the instructor is one of the pieces of the content.
Kissinger: To build on that, it’s kind of an introduction, a “show me, let me try” assignment. That’s how the Earth science class is organized. It comes with a small rock kit the students use. One thing I think came out well in Earth science was that the instructor in the lab created different scenarios and encouraged the students to use what was available to them in their natural learning environment; kind of building on situational learning theory and building on the motivation gained from their authentic learning environment. That was a course that was really well suited to situational learning theory. As students serving around the world may have access to a multitude of different geographies and landscapes, for Earth science, I think students would be motivated by their authentic learning environment. That’s one of the strands of research that’s being investigated right now in mobile learning research; trying to build on the authentic nature of learning in the context of the learner’s environment.
Moorash: You know, Jeff, you’re absolutely right in terms of the science class doing that. But I also felt that you focused this extremely well in the English class as well. There was this real focus making certain the learner was tuned into their environment as it related to the content being discussed. That was an important element that was started through those courses and one of your biggest successes, I think, because you allowed them to use their local environment, even in English class work, with the normal everyday experiences that they have. This can translate into the building of a thesis and looking at threaded ideas and weaving them together using these experiences in their everyday life. So the situational learning theory was a big component of this and one reason why it was really successful.
Kissinger: I really appreciate that and can’t wait to pilot these. That success is really credited to the instructors themselves. The extensive training we did with the instructors and their self-directed instructional design workshops I think indicates that we were really successful in getting the instructors to wrap their heads around the kind of environment that these students would be in. The challenge was shaping the instructional design to meet that academic rigor in keeping students engaged and motivated when they’re so disconnected. I think they really did try to build a lot of opportunities for situational learning and authentic learning throughout all the modules and their assignments.
Q: I believe you wanted to talk more about the development of the program.
Kissinger: We kind of touched organically on that. On the front end, we did an analysis of this type of learner and the environment, and tried to get as much information about how the student would be taking classes in this fashion. Without constant Internet connectivity, or they may have some intermittent connectivity that we could exploit. We worked with faculty—active designers not only in being the subject matter experts in creating their activities and assignments but in sequencing their courses in a traditional curriculum format whether it be distance learning or traditional. But we also actively involved them in the media creation as well.
We touched on how we tried to create a very personal instructional presence with a virtual guide. We had real college instructors who created media, recorded themselves and guided the student in a very learner-centered fashion in each of the modules. And he kind of walked them through each of the modules and their learning activities in an offline fashion. This was, as Amy mentioned, learner-content interaction. Without the luxury of being able to participate in traditional forms of interaction—teacher-learner, learner-learner—we had to rely solely on the times of disconnectivity with learner-content interaction. We felt that if we tried to encapsulate as much of the learner-centered personalization, each of these faculty experts would be engaging and hopefully motivating to the soldier student during those times of long disconnectivity. They had extensive training with creating the media and adjusting the raw media.
We also had instructional design workshops on self-directed learning activities. Dr. Foudy from the University of North Florida worked the lead workshop on that. We worked with them throughout the entire year as we developed the media and the courses. As Amy mentioned, they were well aware of this type of student and the environment, and through each step, each piece of content they created, each activity, they were trying to engage that learner. Their job was very, challenging because it’s very uncertain at this point what the student is going to feel, how the student is going to be successful in the mobile learning environment.
I think there needs to be some research of what the mobile learning experience is like, to sort of ferret out these themes. Are student services going to be a factor? Is engagement and motivation going to be sustained through the use of heavy instructional media? These are all the things that need to be discovered so that we can then apply them to the programs that we offer in this fashion, in the instructional design and in the support services for the mobile learner.
Moorash: I just want to add on a little bit—Jeff, as you were talking, you were discussing what Florida did to outfit the faculty and to make sure they were qualified and prepared for the environment. The contract requires that faculty be certified by the institution. It didn’t tell Florida how to do that, but in my experience having worked with a lot of higher education communities, the certification to teach in an online environment or a mobile environment can be haphazard. I mean a lot of colleges have really rigorous programs; others have very minimal requirements. Florida really took it to the nth degree in this regard because they required the faculty to not only complete these technology orientations and training using the software, they brought them in, they trained them, they used examples of the military experience to help them be aware of the disconnected learner and the nature of their learning. Those certification procedures for their faculty were really paramount in helping this project be a success.
Kissinger: Absolutely. And we’re fortunate to have fully qualified and dedicated instructors to choose from. They faced the challenge and created a very strong course design by the end of this project. Having gone through this course development process, they had been through a low-level transformational experience in terms of their instruction and the tools they have now applied to various learning scenarios, blended face-to-face online and now, the mobile environment.
Q: How was the program evaluated?
Kissinger: The courses were each evaluated by the Army and they were done in sets of two. We had a development cycle of three months, and I believe you had a month to review each set.
Moorash: Originally the contract required a review of 20 days, and it got to be ridiculous because the contract also required a 100 percent review of the deliverable, which meant I had to spend some time going through them. They were so intense in terms of their media content and the depth of information available that it soon became impossible for the Army to achieve that objective. We extended the Army review process to make it a month. One of our lessons learned early on in the contract was that the review process really did step through every module there, looking at all of the content, all of the delivery of electronic media and also looking at it in terms of what the academic goals of the courses were, how well the objectives were outlined and whether or not we achieved it from the Army’s standpoint. From a best practices standpoint for distance education, the modules examined whether or not those courses would meet those objectives; in other words, whether or not the pedagogy was maintained. We did two courses with each delivery and two courses every quarter with a month to review those.
Q: Is the program going to be adopted by the Army?
Moorash: I think the Army was very impressed with what Florida delivered. The contract ended and didn’t require the fielding of these courses. Having done fielding at length with Army as part of the eArmyU program, we feel that the mobile learning program was very similar to eArmyU except that it was online delivery rather than laptop. It was a very robust program so the Army isn’t planning on supporting the delivery this way. I would say to you that if Florida were to start offering these courses to soldiers, the Army could rest assured that the soldiers were getting high-quality academic content delivered to them in a very unique environment across a very unique platform. As to where it will go from here, I think that Florida has a lot of potential to take this particular academic design of these courses to a lot of disparate users who don’t have access to the Internet and need learner-directed, self-contained content.
Q: Where do you go from here?
Kissinger: From the college perspective, we are going back to our mission to serve our community and our students which includes the nontraditional learner, military students and students who don’t always have the luxury to be online and have connectivity. We’re trying to increase our academic and rigorous quality courses to all of these populations, especially our military students where connectivity and schedule can sometimes be a challenge. We feel that an innovative delivery method like mobile learning on various devices like UMPCs, handhelds and flash drives are really where we should be going. We hope to be piloting these this summer and after that we want to explore making those available to our military students and any student who has access issues when it comes to connectivity, requiring a more flexible model.
Q: Is there anything else our readers should know?
Moorash: I think Florida had an opportunity to do something really innovative and they developed unprecedented partnerships with their publishers. I think another thing is how well they embedded the course content from the textbooks into the device. It’s woven into the course in such a way that you often weren’t aware that is was chapters out of a book and presented in such a way that it really allowed for this seamless experience as if you were sitting in a class with an instructor. I felt very connected as I was reviewing these with the teacher, as if she or he was teaching these physically to me. That’s a very important element here in this particular craft that they have demonstrated so well.
Florida has partnerships with two publishing companies that I think are unprecedented. There are no models out there for delivery of e-learning solutions and untethered devices like this, so we didn’t have any benchmarks with which to compare it, and we’re really on the burgeoning end of this. In five years I think we’ll begin to see mobile learning really take off and the Army I think is a good candidate for programs like this because they’re diverse and flexible like our soldiers. This kind of learning, when done well, can be very effective, and Florida did a very good job in ensuring that that would happen.
Kissinger: I appreciate that and you’re absolutely right. I think that the name of the game from the college perspective is delivering quality access to education and training in a flexible way, serving our community as best as we can with state-of-the art design and creative use of technology. I think that our academically rigorous mobile learning model is definitely going to be part of this. We really did push publishers to get them to think outside the box and deliver their piece of the puzzle in textbooks and other media and interactive software suites in an offline fashion. When our society is going completely online, you see that the publishers’ materials that used to be delivered in DVDs and CDs—the server-based model. It was difficult at first to conceptualize what we were trying to do; they just assumed that online, that’s where everybody is at. But for a lot of populations, like our military students, they do not have the access and the luxury to be connected. This is a more flexible way, a blended sort of way, and I think that increasing options and flexibility for this population and other populations is the future.
Moorash: We don’t consider this to be the only appropriate mode of learning. It’s one option, one possibility for someone, at a time in their life where they need that kind of environment. That choice and flexibility ought to be there, especially now that the technology allows us to provide it. ♦